You have to imagine this for yourself. You feel thirsty. You've been doing some strenuous activities for a period of time and now need a drink. You approach the kitchen sink with glass in hand, anticipating a cooling sip of water. But as you approach, you suddenly remember that the water is poisoned. Your mind starts to review the latest news about the sicknesses in your neighborhood that have been caused by people drinking the water. The same water that flows in your tap. The only water available.

The millionaire former corporate executive, now governor claims that he has no responsibility for decisions that have permanently sickened thousands of Flint citizens, including infants, children and every other age group, and will almost certainly result in an unknown number of premature deaths.

The governor's handpicked Flint emergency manager switched the city’s water supply to the very highly polluted Flint River in order to cut costs.

​Immediately after the water was switched, Flint residents complained of its foul smell, color and taste and the spread of rashes and sickness.

"State regulators and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional office in Chicago would have acted differently if this water crisis had taken place in a white suburb of Detroit," he wrote.

"In studying the history of environmental justice, you see over and over that it generally takes longer for poor communities to be heard when they make complaints. Government officials received complaints in April 2014 expressing that something was wrong with the water in Flint. If regulators at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had had to drink that water, or serve it to their children, their response would have been different," he added.

Here's the take from filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore: "Let me not mince words: This is a racial crime.

"Everybody knows that this would not have happened in predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor," Moore writes. "Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns."

"It's the Flint River, with hard water, you get a different flavor and feel. It's why General Motors suspended use of Flint Water—it was rusting their parts." "This should have been a red flag," FOX2 points out. "The water was rusting GM's parts—but safe to drink?"

Paul Mohai, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, whose work focuses on racial and socioeconomic factors in pollution, told the Associated Press that the disaster in Flint "may be one of the biggest environmental justice disasters we've seen in a long time."

The city wanted to save money and end its reliance on Detroit, which had been Flint's source of water for nearly five decades.

The cost-saving measure of switching the city’s drinking water source from Detroit to the polluted Flint River had for months corroded the inside of pipes in thousands of households across the city, leaching chemicals including lead into the water supply.

As a result of the state’s failure to properly apply federal standards in treating the Flint river, thousands of residents have been exposed to lead, a neurotoxin that can produce long-term health effects, particularly in young children."

"Somebody needs to go to jail for this, man," said Nichols. "They're poisoning an entire community. A generation of kids will never recover from this. And it's all just to save a few dollars. They played a game of chess with our lives and we lost."

The move was immediately met with outrage among city and state residents, who say the people of Flint should not have to pay for the water that may have exposed them and their loved ones to irreversible lead poisoning.

"They have irreparably harmed children and families by poisoning the water," Lonnie Scott, executive director for Progress Michigan, told Common Dreams. "It is ludicrous that they would even consider sending shut-off notices."

"All arrears should be cleared," Kary Moss, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, told Detroit Free Press on Monday. "No one should have to pay for this."

The city has already been rebuked for dramatically—and suddenly—hiking water rates 35 percent in 2011. A Genesee circuit court judge ruled in August that this hike was unlawful and ordered an injunction.

The tap water in Flint, Michigan has become so contaminated that it now meets the EPA’s official definition of “toxic waste.”

​The spectacle of a community knowingly poisoned has rightly captured the attention of the national media. But Flint’s water emergency also speaks to a much larger crisis. Flint has spent the last two generations battling hostile suburbs for a rational distribution of regional taxes, as Daniel Hertz recently explained in these pages. The competition between municipalities has pitted Flint against its suburbs, producing a race to the bottom in taxation as local officials strive to produce a “better business environment” at the expense of schools, health and public safety.

The city has been blindsided by GM’s strategy of profit maximization, as the company shifted tens of thousands of jobs to the South, West, and beyond, in order to avoid unionized workers. Of the 80,000 GM jobs once located in Flint, some 8,000 remain, while unemployment is double the national average and poverty hovers at 40 percent of the population.

At the same time, the city has seen state interest wane as its demographics have shifted as a result of white flight and regional impoverishment. And while state officials have now recognized the city’s water problem, little has been said about its shuttered schools, lack of safety or grim poverty statistics.

​According to the Michigan Municipal League, between 2003-2013, Flint lost close to 60 million dollars in revenue sharing from the state, tied to the sales tax, which increased over the same decade. During this period, the city cut its police force in half while violent crime doubled, from 12.2 per 1000 people in 2003, to 23.4 in 2011. Such a loss of revenue is larger than the entire 2015 Flint general fund budget. It is estimated that between 2003-2013 the state withheld over $6 billion dollars from Michigan cities.

​Today Flint is bankrupt. Not because its fiscal books are not in order—because it has been bankrupt by the poverty of urban policy, by the willful neglect of authorities and a system that sees little value in the people of this city.